The
human heart, when left to it self, inclines to dissatisfaction and is easily
distracted from its true home. We
concentrate on the loss of our powers, our looks, our ability to control
events. The
paradox is that, the more we learn to surrender ourselves, a more generous and
available self comes into existence.
Allan Jones “Passion for Pilgrimage
There seem to
be passages or doorways through which we must go at certain intervals in our
lives. The most obvious one would be the
transition from adolescence to adulthood.
The events of this passage are well documented; raging hormones, a
striving for independence, a general lack of maturity in dealing with life’s
situations, tensions and anxieties caused by bodily and chemical changes, the
beginning of sexual activity and all the joys and struggles that go with that. But are there not other passages in
life that are not as well known to us?
If one were
to look at Jesus’ life, three passages are easily observable. The first would be His baptism in the river
Jordan when He was awakened to His own personal identity as one with a special
mission.
“As soon as Jesus was baptized, He came up
from the water, and suddenly the heavens opened and He saw the Spirit of God
descending like a dove and coming down on Him.
And a voice spoke from heaven, “this is my Son, the Beloved; my favour
rests on Him.”
(Matt. 3: 16-17)
The second
passage for Jesus would be the forty days He spent in the desert overcoming the
world, the flesh, and the devil so that He could begin His worldly ministry
unobstructed. This time of purification
would enable Him to place the will of the Father over all worldly ambitions,
compulsions, desires, and anything else that might become an obstacle to
following that inner voice.
His third
passage would be in the garden of Gethsemane when, in one final act of
surrender and self-giving, He would consent to let go of His very life. “I
pray that this cup of suffering may pass me by, but your will, not mine, be
done.”
Each of these
passages we must also experience. In
fact, life demands it of us. And the more we resist the movement through these passages, the greater will be our
suffering. We cannot cling to life or
the experiences of life in order to retain them because the cycle of life
demands that we let them go. And through
the process of letting them go, we eventually discover something of much
greater value. The only difficulty is,
that as we are passing through, the fear of being cut off from all that is
familiar obscures our vision and confuses our mind. We experience what Thomas Merton and other
mystics call “spiritual dread”.
I began this
book by describing graced moments as times of wonder and awe, as times to look
forward to and even seek. We must
realize too that graced moments are also those times of passage, times of
struggle, where life is calling us to emerge like butterflies from a
caterpillar’s cocoon. These graced
moments can be frightening to us because they are asking us to move away from
all that is familiar. And we do not know what to expect as we are
drawn into unchartered waters.
These graced moments are asking us to leave behind all that is familiar
and embrace uncertainty. We do not look
forward or seek these times as they go against some natural build-in defense mechanisms that seek comfort and certainty.
These defense mechanisms are built into our physical bodies, our
intellects, and our emotions, and they revolt against these moments of passage
and grace.
One such time
of passage (and therefore grace) was described in the following struggle noted
in my journal on December 26, 1996:
“The weakness that I’m trying so hard to
overcome is my lack of interest in my exterior self and life. This is evident in how it plays itself out in
my day-to-day activities. I struggle to
obtain an explanation as to why I suffer from this lack of interest in order to
overcome my anxiety of it. But I am
beginning to believe that I may just have to learn to live with this anxiety.
Deep within myself, I experience a sense of
security, presence, and peace for which I have no explanation. It resides there when I am in prayer, in
solitude. During these times, my human
outward condition, my weakness, no longer has any relevance. My striving, possessions, and worldly
concerns disappear into insignificance.
It is within that I am at rest, in peace, knowing that I’m loved for who
I am. My human weakness, which I seem to
struggle with so much in my day-to-day activity, are no longer important. They still exists, but causes me no distress or
concern. My deep inner self presides in
silence over all of this. It is here
that I experience my God residing, accepting, loving, nourishing, healing,
allowing the inner fire of His love to glow, assuring me that what I search for
is here; not in the outward struggle to overcome my human weakness. God, in essence, will provide the strength,
perhaps not to heal my poverty, but to overcome it in solitude. Faith is the key; faith in God who resides
with me in solitude”
At this time,
it was apparent that I experienced dissatisfaction with my exterior life but
this was more than compensated for by a rich and satisfied interior life. It often seemed that a solution to such a
dilemma would be to escape entirely to the interior and leave the exterior with
all its confusion behind. Of course, on
quick scrutiny, one could easily conclude that this is not a solution, little
long possible.
Thomas Merton
in his book “No Man Is An Island” touched on what I was experiencing during
this time of passage:
“When a man constantly looks at himself in
the mirror of his own acts, his spiritual double vision splits him into two
people. And if he strains his eyes hard
enough, he forgets which one is real. In
fact, reality is no longer found either in himself, or in his shadow. The substance has gone out of itself into the
shadow, and he has become two shadows instead of one real person.
Then the battle begins. Whereas one shadow was meant to praise the
other, now one shadow accuses the other.
The activity that was meant to exalt him reproaches and condemns
him. It is never real enough; never
active enough. The less he is able to be
the more he has to do. He becomes his
own slave driver – a shadow whipping a shadow to death, because it cannot
produce reality, infinitely substantial reality, out of his own nonentity.
Then comes fear. The shadow becomes afraid of the shadow. He who “is not” becomes terrified at the
things he, cannot do. Where for a while
he had illusions of infinite power, miraculous sanctity (which he was able to
guess at in the mirror of his virtuous actions) now it had all changed.
Why do we have to spend out lives striving to
be something that we would never want to be, if we only knew what we
wanted. Why do we waste our time doing
things which, if we only stopped to think about them, are just the opposite of
what we were made for.
We cannot be ourselves unless we know
ourselves. But self-knowledge is
impossible when thoughtless and automatic activity keeps our souls in
confusion. In order to know ourselves it
is not necessary to cease all activity in order to think about ourselves. That would be useless, and would probably do
most of us a great deal of harm. But we
have to cut down our activity to the point where we can think calmly and
reasonably about our actions. We cannot
begin to know ourselves until we can see the real reasons why we do the things
we do, and we cannot be ourselves until our actions correspond to our
intentions, and our intentions are appropriate to our own situation.
The way
through this uncertain and turbulent passage, I discovered, would be through
inward stillness. In quiet stillness,
allowing my body, my thoughts, and my feelings to be at rest, an inner light
would guide my way through all the transitional difficulties of passages until
a new life blossomed. And it would never
fail that I would be in a better place after than before, emerging once again more
whole, more beautiful, and more accepting of the mystery that’s contained in the human journey.
In the spring
of 1997, this passage would take place at the Abbey of Gethsemane in Bardstown
Kentucky, the Trappist monastery that had captivated and inspired Thomas Merton
for the majority of his life.
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